Getting chicks to eat earlier and more often

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Twenty-four-year-old Last had started a veterinary science degree and identified a need in the poultry market which she teamed up with 29-year-old Toulmin to address.

"At the moment you can’t place hens with chicks on commercial chicken farms for biosecurity reasons," she says. "But 2 per cent of chicks die in the first week of their life as they can't work out how to eat or drink. In nature, mother hens show them."

Last and Toulmin developed a unit that recreates the pecking functions of hens – the motions, the movements and the sounds.

"The core benefit is you get chicks to eat earlier and more often," says Last. "They put on weight more quickly and have lower mortality."

MimicTec has conducted nine trials with real chicks including seven on farms.

"We took what we did out to market and said 'What do you think about this? Would this help?'" says Lord.

She says the feedback was "sometimes brutal" but helpful.

Along its various iterations MimicTec's unit has begun to look less and less like an actual hen but that doesn't seem to deter the chicks.

"We ran a trial with a cherry farmer in Gembrook and got a call from the farmer at 9pm he said he had never seen chick respond this way," says Last. "When the unit goes off all the chicks run over. This is known as 'chick activation' – you take their attention and they focus on a single point."

Sarah Last wants to take MimicTec's technology international.Credit:Scott McNaughton

Commercial trials

MimicTec is now undertaking commercial trials with 40,000 birds with Hazeldenes in May and 50,000 birds with Inghams in June.

"It is a bit left of field, two young people coming into a big business like that and saying 'What do you think about this?'" says Last.

But the poultry giants were attracted by MimicTec's most recent trials in where the chicks have ended up 4 per cent bigger.

"The final step is to scale up from what we first built, to what the farmers said would be useful," says Lord.

MimicTec has attracted both attention and funding.

The start-up took out the University of Melbourne end-of-year pitch competition of $10,000 and received $20,000 from the Melbourne Accelerator as seed funding.

MimicTec then got an investment of $250,000 from female-focused angel investor network Scale Investors and an Accelerating Commercialisation grant from the government of $200,000.

"It keeps you up at night and it is a bit stressful thinking of what the next steps are going to be but all things that are worthwhile in life take a bit of extra effort," says Last.

Poultry is just the beginning

Last says MimicTec still has some work to do to get its product right.

"We are still commercialising what is core research so for the next two years it is building up the use cases and hopefully moving into early sales," she says. "Poultry is just the beginning so we want to start fleshing out what product ideas would look like in other industries."

Ariane Baker, chief executive of Scale Investors, says Mimictec's product is a "true innovation" in agricultural technology for the Australian farming industry.

"They have identified a real market problem and are developing a real solution," she says. "What we see is selfishly speaking, a really great return on investment, but also a really great future for this business and the entrepreneurs."